1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of manufacturing jelly products having fruit-like fibrous texture wherein a plurality of liquid materials are separately prepared, the resulting liquid materials are mixed at a temperature higher than the gelling temperature determined by the gelling agents used in said liquid materials, then the resulting mixture is cooled for gelling.
2. Discussion of the Background
Heretofore many attempts have been made to give fresh fruit-like texture to jelly products. In accordance with one of the most typical methods, fruit pulps are actually mixed into a liquid material for preparing jelly products. In this method, however, it is required to use a considerably large proportion of pulps in the ingredients for the products to obtain the desired texture and to minimize shearing force applied to the liquid material in the manufacturing process to reduce destruction of the fibrous texture of the pulps. These requirements, however, contradict each other, since increase of the pulp content results in increase of viscosity of the liquid material which in turn results in increase of shearing force to be applied to the pulps in the liquid material and increases destruction of fibrous texture of the pulps during the process. Thus this method is not applicable to the cases wherein fruits having soft texture such as melons, peaches and bananas are used.
There are known methods wherein jelly products are made to imitate fruit-like texture without using textures originating from fruit pulps. One typical method is a freezing/thawing method (cf: Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Gazette Nos. 57 (1982)-189653 and 57(1982)-36950). More particularly, jelly is frozen to form ice crystals in a gel texture, and after permitting the ice crystals grow to a desired extent for partial destruction of the gel texture, the frozen jelly is thawed to form partially destroyed and partially undestroyed texture to thereby form fibrous texture as a whole. This method, however, suffers from the defects that a large scale installation for freezing and thawing is required when the method is carried out on an industrial scale and becomes difficult to manufacture fibrous jelly products having uniform quality due to non-uniform growth of ice crystals caused by slight or subtle variations of freezing conditions such as temperature, speed, and time for freezing.
Another typical method is that fibrous texture is formed using some combination of gelling agents (cf: Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Gazette Nos. 59(1984)-159745 and 59(1984)-159746). More particularly, fibrous texture is formed by mixing a first liquid material containing gelatin and a second liquid material containing at least a gelling agent selected from the group consisting of carrageenan, furcellaran, low methoxyl pectin and agar-agar under acidic condition for reaction therebetween. The defects of these methods are that the formation of fibrous texture and furthermore solidification of the mixture of said first and second liquid materials cannot be assured depending upon slight or subtle variation of the reaction conditions such as temperature and agitation during the reaction process, since the optimum temperature range in which the fibrous textures are formed in the mixture of the first and second liquid materials is very close to the gelling temperature of the mixture.
In order to solve the problems encountered in the conventional methods, the inventors of the present invention have developed a new and simple method which is well suited for industrially manufacturing jelly products having fibrous texture in uniform quality.